OCR AS Psychology
by TheTrueHalfBloodPrincess
Summary: A series of one-shots about various characters, there will be one chapter per study. Ideas improvements and questions are always welcome and I will do my best to reply/correct. If anyone wants me to write about another subject I am open to suggestions. M x
1. Maguire

Arthur Weasley was well known for his interest in muggles and their lives. What people didn't know was that he had started taking their subjects and exams to find out how all their _eckeltricity_ worked and how their aeroplanes stay up. At the moment he was sat in a muggle lecture all about memory, this had also intrigued his daughter in law Hermione who had agreed to accompany him to see whether the muggle studies of the brain could be of use in the wizarding world.

The pair sat at the back and watched as a man just older than Hermione started his talk; **"Hello, I'm James tonight's guest speaker. Today our main focus will be the hippocampus,"** He waved his arm motioning towards a large white board which lit up with an image of a brain the hippocampus highlighted, **"the area of the brain associated with memory, we will be looking at a study by Miss Eleanor Maguire who concentrated on the differences between your average persons brain and that of a taxi driver."**  
"What is a traxci driver?" Arthur whispered.  
"Taxi and it's a job where someone drives other people where they want to go, a bit like Stan and Ernie on the nightbus, but only a few people can go together so they don't have to be with strangers." Hermione answered, now used to having to answer all of Arthurs questions about muggles.

**"Let us begin with some context, psychologists"** "Muggle healers who look at how the brain works" **"had been discussing Localisation, the idea that certain areas of the brain do different things. The hippocampus was believed to provide a mental representation of spatial relations, this had stemmed from biological studies of birds. Lee et al found that the hippocampus in birds and mammals was capable of growing more cells, neuroplasticity, and Smulders" Here an image of a black and white bird popped up. "found that in birds like the black-capped chickadee, the size of the hippocampus was larger in periods when they had to remember where they have buried their excess food. This led Maguire to the conclusion that people who use their navigational skills more often could also develop a larger hippocampus. This became the basis for Maguire's aim, would taxi drivers have a larger volume of hippocampus than that of other people or not?"**

James smiles a full set of white teeth on show.** "Maguire's taxi driver sample consisted of 16 right-handed male with an average age of 44. They had all worked as licensed London Taxi drivers for between one and a half and forty-two years. She used a matched control group of only right handed healthy males between the ages of 32 and 62, 50 people were chosen for this group. The dependant variable of the study was the hippocampal volume which was measured using an MRI scan."  
**"A muggle piece of technology used to take pictures of the brain without cutting them open. Its a little bit like the ultrasound scan used to give the picture of baby." Hermione placed her hand on her slightly rounded stomach, smiling gently as she thought of her child growing inside her.  
**"Each measurement was taken by someone unaware of the participants condition, to avoid any experimenter biases which could occur. VBM or voxel-based morphometry was used to take the image and then a method of pixel counting was used to calculate the number of 1.5mm³ in each participants hippocampus. The results were not quite as Miss Maguire had expected,"** The board was now lit up with a table displaying the results. **"as you can see she was correct in that the taxi drivers did have a larger central and posterior hippocampus. However the non-taxi drivers had a much larger anterior. This led Maguire to the conclusion that the distribution of grey area in the hippocampus changes with use therefore suggesting that by becoming a taxi-driver the volume of your hippocampus will grow rather than that having a large hippocampus will lead to starting work as a taxi driver. Thank you all for listening, goodnight."**

The lecturer walks off the stage his messy strawberry blond hair bouncing in time with his steps. Arthur immediately rather excitedly whether they can get a taxi, Hermione just sighs getting out of her seat and leading him to the nearest train station.


	2. Rosenhan

**Rosenhan's Study of the reliability and validity of psychiatric diagnosis**

**1970s America**

Professor T. Riddle was sat at his desk pondering the latest incident within his ranks. Bellatrix Lestrange was no longer the woman she used to be, ever since she had been _accidentally_ admitted to a muggle** psychiatric ward** she kept going on about this **Elizabeth Cockran **woman. She was driving him crazy and to shut her up, or so he kept telling himself, he had looked Cockran up. Apparently **in 1887 she checked herself in to one of the newly opened hospitals as an insane patient. She reported findings such as how easy to gain admittance but hard to leave, in the newspaper she wrote for.**

Riddle was an **anti-psychiatrist, thinking it to be a pseudoscience and that if anything it was the hospital which drove them mad,** Bella was one example of this. Maybe what Bellatrix had been trying to tell you is that she really is still sane.

Riddle decided **to test Cockran's theory. **He gathered **8 (5 male 3 female) **of his followers; Yaxley, Amycus and Alecto Carrow (who had all **studied psychology** as part of a mission previously), Narcissa Malfoy (a **housewife**), Bellatrix (after Riddle had checked and fixed her mind), Crabbe (who was apparently a **painter**), Gibbon (a **paediatrician** as you would expect a death eater to be) and, Rookwood (who had become a **psychiatrist** himself as part of his work as an unspeakable).

Riddle instructed them all to have a **pseudonym (fake name)** **and for anyone who had mental health professions or history to lie about it. They used fake symptoms which included hearing a voice saying hollow dull thud until they were admitted when all symptoms would be immediately dropped and would behave as normal.**

Riddle sent them out to **12 different hospital in 5 different states along the east and west coast. The hospitals varied in age, staff levels and public/privet, **of course he made sure to send the lovely Mrs Malfoy to the dirtiest of the lot that would serve her right for all those complaints. **The pseudopatients spent their time writing observations, obeyed instructions and whenever asked how they were would say that they were fine. No medication was swallowed and overall 2100 pills were disposed of. Only one patient did not wish to be discharged immeadiatly.**

**They all stayed for between 7 and 52 days with 19 as their average** plenty of time to have some peace and quiet if it weren't for the hundreds of letter Bella managed to secretly send filled with complaints which all ended up as ashes. **They were all discharged (with only one exception) as having schizophrenia in remission.**

Gibbon kept accurate counts on the suspicions he received, he found that **35 out of 118 other patients suspected his sanity and voiced it. They made comments like "You're not crazy. You're a journalist, or a professor. You're checking up on the hospital."**

One reason the death eaters **may not have been detected as sane by the staff may have been because physicians would rather a type 2 error (diagnosing a healthy person sick) than a type 1 error. **Or at least that's what the results suggested.

Riddle decided to set up a second experiment, **he told the hospitals that he would be sending some pseudopatients at some point within the next 3 months. 193 patients were judged, 41 were assumed to be fake, however none were in fact sent. ** To be honest Riddle had more to do such as daydream about Potters demise and read books on the dark arts.

Tom found that **"the label [of schizophrenia] is so powerful that many of the pseudopatients normal behaviours overlooked entirely or profoundly misinterpreted" **The death eaters **all took notes oublically, one set of notes included the statement "patient engages in writing behaviour". **That particular nurse had to be obliviated after Yaxley read that. And Bella excessively complained after having to bite her toungue when asked **"Nervous, [pseudonym]?""No, bored" while pacing.**Amycus found that even the** insane had sane periods** in which they acted normally. He also heard a **nurse saying that she believed "mental illness endures forever". **

Narcissa got particularly pissy when she found that **the staff were separated and that they spent very little time with the patients before returning to the "cage". **This was not improved as **when she asked questions such as when she would be allowed grounds privileges, 71% of the psychiatrist and 88% of nurses moved on with their head averted without answering.**

Riddle was extremely pleased that he had had the forethought to remove all their wands or there would be many obliviators from the accidental magic reversal squad to deal with the various issues. He was also pleased to discover that his idea of the **impossibility to diagnose the sane and insane was correct, however he couldn't come up with any points which could improve these diagnosises.**


End file.
